We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after the explosion of atomic bombs. However, we know little about the progress made by the people at that exact locationÂ during the past 65 years.

Len Brown ratcheted up rates while he was dropping his tweeds in the Town Hall.

In some areas there has been a 42% increase in rates and a drop in services provided…like the mowing of berms.

In Detroit the city is broke, it is where Auckland is heading with a mayor who can’t control his libido let alone the spending his council is making. The city in Detroit stopped maintaining parks and ignoring the citizens who pay the taxes for the maintenance of things like parks.

Tom Nardone, founder of the Detroit Mower Gang, doesn’t really see himself as an innovator. He’s just a guy who saw a need and a way to address it. While his “gang” has attracted the attention of visiting celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern, what gives him the most satisfaction is seeing kids playing on a swingset he just mowed around.Â Read more »

He was the city mayor who lined his pockets as the one-time industrial powerhouse he presided over lay in ruins. And now, as he faces 28-years behind bars, the former mayor of Detroit has said the city can finally â€śmove onâ€ť following a series of corruption scandals.

The conviction of Kwame Kilpatrick, who served as mayor for six years until 2008, brings to a sorry end the ruin of the man who represented the downfall of the now-bankrupt city that was once the beating heart of US car production.Â Read more »

This story is disgusting, another candidate for a long drop off a short rope.

What do you do when even the police wonâ€™t respond fast enough to a rape case? For members of a Detroit community, the answer was simple: vigilante justice.

Residents of Hubbard Farms, Detroit, beat up a man accused of raping a 15-year-old girl with Down syndrome Thursday, WXYZ reports. The police have not made an arrest for 23 days since the victim said a man grabbed her on the way to work, took her to his apartment, and raped her.

Community members say the police took five days to interview the victim after she reported the rape, and 21 days to send a rape kit to the Michigan State Crime Lab.

The alleged rapist lives in the same neighborhood as the victim, and the community resorted to posting his face on flyers to warn others.

When frustrations finally boiled over, residents beat the man with a baseball bat so badly he had to be taken to the hospital.

Megan Herres, a family friend of the victim, told WXYZ she didnâ€™t support vigilantism but that the situation was untenable.

â€śThere was a lot of community response in asking the police for their assistance in apprehending the perpetrator and it wasnâ€™t happening in a timely manner,â€ť she said. â€śItâ€™s not good to live in a community where people donâ€™t feel safe.â€ť

Police say they are â€ślooking intoâ€ť the delay in the case.

Detroit Police are infamous for their failure to deal with even serious crime efficiently. In Detroit, it takes almost an hour for police to respond to a 911 call. The national average is 11 minutes.

Over the weekend Detroit finally declared bankruptcy, pushed under by a debt burden of locked in spending promises and shrinking tax revenues. But during the 2012 presidential campaign we were repeatedly told that Obama had saved Detroit…but did he?

The news that the city of DetroitÂ is declaring bankruptcyÂ may not surprise many observers who were aware of how economic decline, shrinking population, the burden of huge public employee contracts and political corruption was leading inevitably to this outcome. But it might come as something of a shock to the vast majority of Americans whose only thoughts about the subject prior to today were framed by the demagoguery on the issue that came from President Obamaâ€™s reelection campaign. As we all recall, Democrats spent a good deal of 2012 telling us that â€śGeneral Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is deadâ€ť and hounding Mitt Romney for saying that Detroit would be better off going bankrupt rather than being bailed out by the federal government. But yesterday we learned that all the sunny talk about what Obama had accomplished did nothing to save the city.

Now will come the weasel words…politicians have plenty of those.

Of course, Democrats will say that when they were talking about â€śDetroitâ€ť last year, they were just using the word as shorthand for the automobile industry and not referring to the Motor City itself. But the memory of the wayÂ the president pounded Romney on the issueÂ should do more than point out Obamaâ€™s hypocrisy. The collapse of what was once one of Americaâ€™s great cities should also inform us about the way the liberal project is dooming municipal and state governments around the country as well as Washington to a sea of debt that cannot be sustained. Detroit isnâ€™t just the most spectacular example of urban blight. Itâ€™s the poster child for the consequences of liberal governance. Â Read more »

We keep hearing that the car industry in Detroit is â€śon the reboundâ€ť or that â€śDetroit is back.â€ť In fact, the city itself is on its back, and itâ€™s bounding toward bankruptcy or a state takeover. How did one of Americaâ€™s most storied cities land in this predicament? While the city population has shrunk (from a peak population of 1.8 million in 1950 to 714,000 in the last census), it has hardly reduced the government that serves it. All you really need to know about Detroit, which is facing a $327 million budget gap, is that last year it was discovered toÂ still be paying forÂ Â a â€śhorseshoerâ€ť (or farrier) on the Detroit Water & Sewer Department (DWSD) payroll. This individual costs some $56,000 in pay and benefits, despite the city not having any horses to shoe in his department.

Union bosses insisted the DWSD (average compensation: $86,000) needs more, not fewer, such unionized employees, a view associated with a broad spectrum of thinkers from Jimmy Hoffa to the Keynesians running the United States. The DWSD has more than twice as many employees per gallon of water pumped as that other paragon of Midwestern governance, Chicago. An independent report said four out of five employees in the bloated department were redundant and discovered a thicket of union regulations driving up costs.Plumbers complainedÂ that, due to union work rules, they had to wait to fix pipes until duly authorized â€śoperatorsâ€ť came along first to shut them off.Â Read more »

In a town lacking essential services, what do local leaders and federal politicians have in mind for helping the city? What’s needed to hoist Detroit back to its 1950 heyday, when it was America’s fourth largest city, with more than double its current population?

Why,Â light rail, of course!

The words used by Detroits city officials are alarmingly similar to Len Brown’s and Celia Wade-Brown’s.

I love the quote in the middle of the video – “You simply cannot have a Manhattan without a subway, but its not the subway that built Manhattan, Manhattan built the subway. Light Rail is not going to build Detroit”. Basically businesses built those things to meet a profitable demand. There is another quote 4:02, “People like to get from point a to point b as quickly as possible, so the bus system, particularly in citied like Detroit, is going to be far more effective in serving the needs of the low income than developing a transit system.” That isÂ particularlyÂ relevant to the people most poorly served by public transport right now, the citizens Â of the South and West of Auckland.

But it isn’t like Detroit hasn’t had already had an experiment in light rail before, they have the under-utilised “People-Mover”. It operates at just 2.5% capacity.

If the insane inner city rail loop and Len Brown’s other $5 billion of rail promises are built, especially the link to the airport, then someday,Â this absurdity in Auckland might be a tourist attraction, but that is all it will be.

At least already Len seems to be getting the message that despite his promises there isn’t bottomless pits of money and that if he doesn’t work with government then his pet projects aren’t going to get built. He has had to cave in on the Puhoi-Wellsford highway. That’s his first, of what is likely to be a Len-slide of failed promises.

“Clearly the Government have got the bit between their teeth in terms of Puhoi to Wellsford,” Mr Brown said. “It’s a road of national significance. I’m not going to get myself overly involved in that debate.”

Hmmm…Len’s public transport supporters won’t be happy with his capitulation over a roading project they wanted canceled.